Night-Owl Trucking

Tuesday, 4:01pm PT / 5:01 MT

Emira watched the numbers on the screen tick down to '10' while she hummed an absentminded tune under her breath. The elevator car bounced slightly to a stop, then the mirror-bright doors hissed open with a cheerful ding and she walked across the lobby toward her sister's bank-vault-shaped laboratory door. She began to sing, having hummed her way back around to the beginning of the chorus. "Life is a highway, I wanna ride it—" Emira blinked and growled, "Dammit." She had called the Night-Owl Trucking office earlier that morning to discuss payment details and that damn earworm (https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=U3sMjm9Eloo) had been playing while she spoke to Eda, several other voices in the background singing along loudly and off-key. It had been stuck in her head ever since.

She gave herself a savage shake and forcibly thought of a different tune—the mnemonic she and Edric used to get their little sister's keycode entered properly—while she paused with her finger poised over the keypad beside the reinforced steel door. Emira punched in a quick twenty-digit number, mouthing the first few as she went, oh one one eight, nine-nine-nine, eight eight one, the blip and bleep of the keypad a short chip-tune accompaniment to the string of numbers in her mind. Once Amity's unnecessarily long access code had been accepted by the entryway monitor, she pressed her thumb to the biometric scanner. It beeped twice, and the door unlocked with a rapid series of loud, mechanical chunks. She stepped into an active disaster area.

Edric had taken over Amity's wide-open motion testing range in his mad scramble to prepare a set of decoy crates. He knelt beside one of the steel-banded wooden containers, the end of his blue necktie tucked into the front of his dress shirt. Bits of black foam stuck to his clothes and his hair, and he had either smudged grease or black ink across his cheek at some point in the last few hours. Emira breathed in, paused, then gave a few shallow sniffs. Was something burning? she briefly wondered, glancing about for signs of smoke. A small pile of computer towers and laptops stood nearby, half-buried under empty plastic clamshell containers and loosely coiled black cables tipped with golden connectors. A waist-high pile of three-inch-thick shipping foam sheets had tipped over, spilling underneath a worktable covered with half-assembled control units and sensors, the remaining tabletop littered with tools.

"—broke a building?" Edric squealed in delight, a boxy gray satellite phone pressed between his shoulder and his ear. "Nice job, Mittens!" he gushed with a wide grin on his face. He snorted in a choked bit of laughter as he glanced in his twin's direction and nodded upward, 'sup?, then he bent back over a mid-sized computer tower laying on a thick sheet of dark gray foam. He lazily traced around the computer's shape with a white pencil as he added, "I didn't realize destruction of private property was one of their prime directi— oh, an accident?" He paused for a fraction of a second to switch the pencil from one hand to the other, shrugging, "No worries, I'll buy it as soon as we get off the phone."

Accident? A spike of concern shot through her chest as Emira leaned forward to catch his eye and mouthed, What happened?

"Yeah, yeah, no, it's fiiine, don't worry!" Her brother promised their itinerant sister as he held up a finger, like, just a sec, then gave Emira a quick head-shake of dismissal, a half-smushed expression that read no problem on his face as he tried to reassure her while also keeping the phone tightly pressed to his ear. "Send me the address. Yeah, uh-huh." He twisted on his toes and leaned over to pull an open laptop close, the fingers of one hand dancing across the keyboard, "Hold on, repeat that? Okay. Uh-huh. Utah? Gross." A map opened in a black browser window, and a satellite image of a wooden building with a sprawling parking lot filled the screen. "Oh, it's a restaurant?" Edric gasped in surprise, "I always wanted to be a chef!"